


Setting Fast

by Jairissa



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Temporary Character Death, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jairissa/pseuds/Jairissa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Constants and variables. Choices and reactions. A thousand Elizabeths and a thousand mistakes. This Elizabeth wants to make a difference choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Setting Fast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlatine/gifts).



 

 

_"Elizabeth. Did you…you saved me?"_

_"No. You saved me."_

* * *

She regrets it the moment his face reappears, raising from the water to the gasps of the people she had forgotten. Some back away horrified; others appear fascinated, watching a myriad of identical women, all come to drown one man. Someone gasps _angels_ , the priest _witch_. It doesn't much matter which, Elizabeth decides. There have been moments she's felt like both.

 

Her "sisters" watch her, watch each other. She sees her own regret in some of their eyes. In others there is determination, confusion, satisfaction, and a weird twisted joy. She hates herself for those ones; for the her that could have been if just a few small things had been different. Or maybe there were a lot of big things. She doesn't have the energy to work through the implications.

 

_Constants and variables_.

 

She had eliminated one constant, and the part of her that still thrums with the multiverse tells her it was the best choice. It had echoed, sang in her veins so loudly that Elizabeth had known it was the right thing to do. Had known that no matter her thoughts on it, it had to be done.

 

Now that the music is gone, she knows that it wasn't it _only_ thing that could be done. Just the only thing had _must_ be.

 

She had eliminated more Comstocks than not. In most realities, baby Anna would grow with, and then away from, her father. She could see the possibilities, could see Booker's broken choices, his self fractured with no Elizabeth to help puzzle himself back together.

 

Some men, Elizabeth realises, need a hard lesson in order to learn, to grow. She had become that hard lesson. Now she would never exist to do it.

 

A hard moral to grasp, when around her she begins to disperse, a hundred costumed Elizabeth's fading away to whatever choice they had made. A thousand more still standing. Still contemplating.

 

She wonders how many of them felt as she did; with constants and variables crawling over her skin like someone was writing them there, the ink invisible and indelible, burning and freezing all at once. She wonders how many feel more, had been pushed into powers that even she can't understand. She wonders how many feel less, endured less, and envies them.

 

_"You made the right choice."_

Elizabeth starts, as do others of her.  Others don't. Maybe that answers her question. As more fade away, she thinks maybe it doesn't. Is this going to be her life now? Always, always more questions than answers.

 

_"That's life. There are never any answers. Not good ones."_   

 

Closing her eyes, she slowly detaches herself from the _all_ and reawakens in the _now_. The air smells different than she remembers, and her lungs don't breathe as easily. She recalls something about altitudes and their effects on the human lungs, though she doesn't recollect that book being in her library. She doesn't remember that book being _invented_ yet, and she realises that it is knowledge from another Elizabeth, and wonders how many of her memories are still her own.

 

The water is cold when she wades in, and Elizabeth struggles to pull Booker out of it. He looks wrong, the blue lips accented quickly paling skin. She wretches a little then drops him and is too tired to pick him back up again. Her legs stumble, and she falls, the water rising to cover her neck, her chin…she barely keeps her mouth above water, but that's enough to ensure oxygen still enters her lungs.

 

It would be easier, Elizabeth knows, if it didn't.

 

Booker's body still floats next to her. _Oh God._ There is something so wrong with this, and Elizabeth can't make her mind understand what that is. A river. A body. These were the necessary things, and so Comstock is gone and Booker.

 

 

_"It's not your fault."_

 

"It is," she whispers, and she's crying. It's ridiculous. Elizabeth knew Songbird her whole life and Booker mere hours, so why is she crying over the loss of another father she should hate, than the friend who had…had held her captive, and protected her, and confined her, and…

 

"Booker," Elizabeth whispered, scrubbing at her eyes. "Where are you?"

 

_"I'm right here."_

 

It had been meant esoterically, a question to herself to try and explore the pathways in her mind, hoping one would light up with a path that looped back around the decision she had just made and bring her Booker back. Then Elizabeth looks up and he's there. He's Booker.

 

He's translucent.

 

"Booker?"

 

_"In a way."_

 

"I don't understand," Elizabeth says, her fingers clutching at her choker, tugging until her skin aches from the pressure.

 

_"I thought you understood everything.”_

 

 The transparent, almost glowing man's mouth moves, but the voice is coming as much from inside her as it is from him. She shakes her head, thinking over medical texts, and shock, and psychosis, but it doesn't feel that way. _He_ feels…almost like her. He doesn’t belong here, in this now, but he still exists enough to see, to interact.

 

"I understand every-when," Elizabeth corrects absently. "When I concentrate."

 

_"Close enough."_

 

She lost him what is only hours ago to her, but somehow his voice in her head makes it seem less real. As though he has only been misplaced, rather than lost to her.

 

No, that's not right.

 

Her Booker is gone, she firmly tells her confused heart. She killed him, because she had to, because a thousand Elizabeths from a thousand worlds had joined with her in trying to solve a problem with only one, horrible solution.

 

So why does it feel as though he is still with her?

 

_"I am with you."_

The answer comes immediately, too soon after her own thoughts.

 

"With me, or from me?" She doesn't want the answer, and instinctively puts her hands to her ears to block it out.

 

_"Either. Both. Does it matter?"_

 

"Yes," she whispers. "It matters."

  
The hurt hits her then, the grief, and her legs collapse under her. She can _feel_ him, everything she felt _for_ him, swirling around her head, lighting some of the pathways and blocking others. She reaches up to brush an image of him away, but it remains, stubborn. Booker's voice is her own when she whispers his name, but the echoes of it still seem to come from outside her.

 

"Are you real?"

 

_"Yes and no. Either and both. I am as real as you are, now."_

 

Elizabeth contemplates that, and all its layers of meanings. She is real, now. She is here and solid. Yet in _this_ now, this specific now, she does not exist and was never meant to. If she did, it was as Anna, and Anna would not have been born yet. She is here in this now, but not.

 

"If there were a thousand Elizabeths," she says, phrasing her words carefully. She does not yet understand what they mean, but she can always hope the answer will be as she wants it to. "And I heard all of their voices inside me, that does not make them any less their own person, still separate from me. Is it possible that out of a thousand Bookers, there might be one I can hear, I can see, that is also not me?"

 

_"Anything is possible."_

 

"If I found you," she whispers, brushing tears out of her eyes before they can spill down her face. "If that was possible…would you be the Booker I knew?"

 

_"How many Bookers did you know?"_

 

"What do you mean?"

 

_"I made choices, and I died. I tossed a coin, and failed you a hundred and twenty-two times._

_I travelled to the future and met an Elizabeth that will never exist._

_How many Bookers did you really meet? Were the ones that came back the same as the ones that left?_

_How many Elizabeths did I meet before I succeeded?_

_What's the difference?"_

"I don't know," Elizabeth says. She looks up at the lighthouse, at the city around her, and the rapidly lightening sky. "I don't know how to know that. They, we, are all variables, as much choices as we are people."

 

_"So I ask again. Does it matter? If I remember you, and you me, what more do you need than that?"_

_Certainty_ , she thinks, but Booker's voice has a point that she can't yet comprehend. He knew other Elizabeths, he must have. Did he love them, or her? Functionally, what possible difference could there be? They were her. Some had the same memories as her, each detail of them. Some she had nothing in common with at all.

 

They did not feel like her, but to him they must be. How many Bookers _had_ she known, without realising the difference?

 

"Booker?" She asks, her voice small. "What should I do?"

 

_"See Paris."_

 

"There's nothing for me in Paris," Elizabeth says, bitterness tightening her throat. If she's being realistic, there's nothing for her anywhere. Columbia is in flames. Songbird is at the bottom of the sea, in a city that doesn’t exist yet. In this now, she realises, letting the possibilities flow through her, it likely never would.

 

So many little girls, trapped in a worse way than her.

 

_"You can't save them all."_

"I could," Elizabeth says, letting go of them nonetheless. "But it's not my place. Not this me. Another choice is making that sacrifice."

 

Elizabeth grieves for that self, but she lets go of them too. It would be too easy to attach herself to all of them, to become every Elizabeth at once, and then she would be truly lost. Elizabeth doesn't want to be lost anymore. She wants…well, that part she hasn't quite worked out yet.

 

Booker smiles at her, the tight, unhappy one that is the closest permutation Elizabeth has seen to happiness. She wondered if any variation of Booker knew what that was.

 

"I hate this," Elizabeth sighs. "I hate being so many people, in so many places. I just want to be one person, Booker. One choice."

 

_"Make a choice."_

 

"It's not that easy," Elizabeth points out. "I wish it was, but…"

 

_"It is. Make a choice. Follow it. Let other Elizabeths make other choices."_

"It's that simple?"

 

_"Yes."_

 

"And if I make the choice to save you?"

 

_"Which me?"_

 

"Any you. Any you that…that remembers me," she breaks then, her voice cracking. "Will any of you remember me?"

 

Booker doesn't answer. The figure doesn't waver, doesn't flicker. It just watches her, a perfect replica of the bloating body in the river next to her. Elizabeth gags, and pushes herself away from it. It hadn't looked so awful, she had thought minutes ago, but now that she looks the sky is dark and small pieces of Booker's skin is starting to flake off.

 

"I'm going to save you," she says out loud, experimentally.

_"There's nothing left to save."_

 

"I'll decide that," she says. She is determined, in this moment, in this thing.

 

_"You never got to see Paris. There must be a thousand of them. Go to Paris, Elizabeth."_

 

"I can do both," she decides, smiling weakly. She can find Booker, she can live her life. She can live her life while, and by, saving Booker.

 

_"It's not worth it."_

 

"I'll decide that," she says.

 

* * *

 

There are, Elizabeth discovers quickly, a multitude of Anna DeWitts, and looking into her own face in reflections, or shiny surfaces, or from distances that distort her vision, Elizabeth hates them all. She hates the Anna that looks up at Booker with adoration as he helps plan her wedding day, and despises even more the ones that look up at him with loathing as they peel the bottle out of his hand and leave him asleep near a pile of his own vomit.

 

There are far more of the latter than the former. Poor Booker. She hadn't realised how very tormented he was, as absorbed as she had been in her own pain. It seems so very trivial now, though the ache and the loneliness stays.

 

"Anna?" one Booker asks after she picks the lock into the tiny apartment.

 

"Yes, Boo-. Yes, Father," she sighs. There is no running water, so she is forced to wet his handkerchief with the amber liquor he had been drinking, and wipe the worst of the mess off his face. There's a little blood, but the wound she discovers underneath is days old, and mostly healed. Booker still winces as the alcohol passes over it.

 

"I thought you weren't coming back," he whispers, his hand reaching up to trace her face. Elizabeth purses her lips, less in disapproval and more in an attempt to hold back the tears and the plaintive wail of _why don't you love me like you love her? I'm here!_ It isn't fair to him. This Booker never made the choice to leave her.

 

"I'm not," Elizabeth says. Booker's eyes flutter closed, and soft, stuttering snores follow soon after.

 

This plan isn't going to work. Anna is a variable she can't factor for. Elizabeth's Booker will not exist where Anna exists, and thanks to Elizabeth, she now exists almost everywhere.

 

It occurs to her that the methodology had been flawed from the beginning. Without Comstock, there would be no kidnapping, no Booker that needed to be sent to Columbia. Without that, there would be no Booker that would, _could_ ever remember her.

 

It was a paradox, and Elizabeth was beginning to hate them.

 

_"I could have told you that."_

 

Elizabeth rolls her eyes at the ghostly Booker, even as she wipes the sweat off the flesh and blood Booker in front of her.  

 

"Now you reappear," she says, getting up to dump the last of the bottle over the balcony. Her ghostly friend tends to vanish when she is in sight of a corporeal version of himself, and resurface when she gives up and opens a tear to a new reality, a new chance.

 

_"You didn't want me."_

 

That much was true. It is hard to want something insubstantial when there is the possibility of reality. The contradiction comes when she realises, has realized a dozen times now, that her ghost is far more of a companion to her than any of the drunken or adoring fathers she has encountered so far.

 

Forgive Elizabeth her French, but _god-damnit it._

 

"What do I need to do?" Elizabeth asks. She slides down against the wall, fighting against her wobbly legs, and fuzzy head. "If I exist, then I can't exist, and…I'm so tired of philosophy, Booker. I'm tired of following pathways that go nowhere. I just want an answer, a single, simple answer."

 

_"Then start from the right place."_

 

"I am!"

 

_"No. You're starting after the journey's been completed. You need to go back to the middle."_

"But Comstock. I'd need to…to stop him again."

 

_"You've already done that."_

 

"Then how can I go to the middle, if the end has already happened?"

 

_"Has every end happened? Is there no future where Comstock continued to exist, even for a moment?"_

Elizabeth opens her mouth in protest, but before she can the possibilities begin to light up in her head. She seems Comstocks, then Bookers. She sees these Bookers replace her again, and again, and again. She sees herself stop them, and despair. So many possibilities, so many choices.

 

"They all lead the same place," she sobs, drawing her knees to her chest, and pillowing her head on top of them. Her arms cover her head, drowning out the snores, and the sound of the city outside the window. "They all lead to…to this! To misery!"

 

_"Impossible. There are too many variables. You'll find the right one."_

"Will you go away if I do?" Elizabeth whimpers. She doesn't hear the rustle of clothing, or the touch of his hand on her shoulder. It's only when she looks up that she sees him there, as perfect as she remembers him, though far less reachable.

 

_"Not if you need me."_

 

"All right," she sighs, and lets go of the tight leash of control she holds on her powers. She drifts, her body the anchor she needs to come back to herself. She looks at each reality, each time in it, only long enough to confirm there is no Anna, or no Comstock, or no new daughter, and then she leaves again, her presence erased from there forever.

 

Then she finds them. A handful, a tiny handful of realities that might work. A dozen broken Bookers, in a city under the sea, one in the sky, and one, terrifying, platform that floats in outer space, forever threatening to plunge onto the land below. The Luteces' perform miracles there, but she doesn't trust them enough to try it.

 

The sea it is. She's tired of the sky, and she's always wanted to see the ocean.

 

_"Rapture will fall."_

"It doesn't have to," Elizabeth says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "I don't have to give up my powers to go there, not this time. I can stop it."

 

_"Constants and variables. The city always falls."_

"But not everyone dies," she corrects him, planning on libraries, on learning, on trying to drive bathyspheres. She's learned more difficult things. A tear would be a last resort, if necessary she will pick a reality where neither of them exist, but she would prefer not. For just a while, she would prefer to let those powers rest and explore the lives everyone else gets to live.

 

_"You might not be able to convince him."_

 

"Will you help me?" She asks hopefully, placing her hand just above her shoulder, where it would rest if he was truly touching her. He looks away, his shoulders raise like he's sighing, but he doesn’t deny it. "Please."

 

_"I'll always help you, Elizabeth."_

 

"Thank you, Booker," she says. She watches them both, the ghost and the living Booker until she is sure the latter will wake again. Then she raises her hands and waits, the edges of reality blurring, both realities dancing in front of her eyes. "Are you ready?"

 

_"Are you?"_

 

* * *

 

Rapture is beautiful. She picked her time carefully, giving her months, maybe a year before the city begins to fracture. Booker has been here long enough to feel comfortable, to not suspect that...actually, Elizabeth's not sure what he would expect. His multidimensional not quite daughter hunting him down to try and find her own happy ending?

 

It was a little twisted, when Elizabeth thinks on it, but she has become a little twisted lately. She finds she doesn't miss it, the innocent girl who believed in happy endings, families and a way to make it home. Still, maybe when she convinces him to leave, they will go to Paris. There's no unhappy memories for either of them there. Not yet.

 

Her ghostly friend stands next to her, as she knocks on the door to DeWitt Investigations. She was meticulous in her choosing. There is no Sally here, there never was. Her parents remain on the surface, happy in their ignorance, and Booker holds on to memories of a wife who died in childbirth and, though he didn't notice his nose bleeding when he remembered this, his daughter who did too.

 

She walks in without knocking, and sees him sitting at his desk. He is older and greyer than her transparent counterpart, but nothing near the Comstock that haunts more of her waking moments than her nightmares. Still, it's Booker, with his tight frown and angry wrinkles.

 

"Booker," Elizabeth breathes, then winces. It was too intimate, and he is suspicious immediately. Of course he is. She has stolen the right clothes, learned the right walk, but there is still something about her that is strange. Elizabeth should have known he would pick up on it immediately.

 

The ghost version of him isn't talking to her as she'd hoped, but he does walk around the desk. She hopes that he will give her some idea of what to do, mouth the right words. Her eyes follow him hungrily, the two Bookers blurring a little in her vision.

 

"What are you doing?" Elizabeth asks, her voice rasping in shock. Both Bookers look at her, and burst into beautiful, brilliant light. Elizabeth turns away, holding her hand to her eyes so that it doesn’t blind her. She counts nearly a minute before it fades away, and she lets her eyes open again.

 

There is one Booker in front of her. Older than her ghost, but younger than the man that should have been. His face gapes when he looks at her, then scrunches, searching her face for something she doesn’t understand.

 

"Elizabeth?" He asks finally, baffled. "I…I remember…"

 

"You remember what?" Elizabeth asks, more confused than she can remember being. She opens her mind to the possibilities, but there is still only one Booker, shining with the physicality of one and the spirit of the other. It doesn't make sense.

 

"I remember you."

 

Elizabeth looks up, tears blurring her view. She shakes her head, and he stands up, moving slowly into the middle of the room.

 

"I remember Anna, and New York. I remember coming here, to…to find…but I still. I remember you. I remember you too," he breathes, and gently, deliberately opens his arms. Elizabeth smiles, _beams_ , and throws herself into them.

 

"I missed you," she whispers into the familiar smelling wool of his jacket. "I missed you so much."

 

"How?" He asks. Elizabeth laughs, but she won't let him go.

 

"Does it matter?" She asks, echoing the ghost's advice.

 

"Elizabeth. Did you…you saved me?" He asks her, confused.

 

"No. You saved me," she answers.

 

 


End file.
